The delegates from the north, who spoke Mandarin dialects, of which the speech of the capital is the best-known example, were evenly matched by delegates from the south, notably from Shanghai.
There are about a dozen schools on Long Island that teach either the Cantonese or Mandarin dialects of Chinese, but most of them hold classes in church basements or in borrowed space at local colleges.
Much dialogue is also carried out in an archaic form of Mandarin Chinese, in which the Zhongyuan Mandarin dialects of Henan and Shaanxi are closest.
Mr. Kuo said he was of the Mandarin dialect.
This nonhereditary elite would eventually become known to the West as "mandarins," in reference to Mandarin, the dialect of Chinese they employed.
There are several hundred such private, part-time Chinese schools, including more than 20 operating in New Jersey, most of which use the Mandarin dialect, widely spoken in mainland China and Taiwan.
Despite its ties to the dominant Mandarin dialect, Vernacular Chinese also permits some communication between people of different dialects, limited by the fact that Vernacular Chinese expressions are often ungrammatical or unidiomatic in non-Mandarin dialects.
The report may be diplomatically written in a Whitehall mandarin dialect, but read between the lines and it represents a withering critique of the state of public order policing.
Some of those who remained, in flats above their shops, kept the lights off to avoid detection and spoke in hushed tones lest their Mandarin dialect be heard on the streets by Tibetans.
In other Mandarin dialects the number of syllables ranges between (I think) about 300 and 450.
